What comes first when your TD has a second job?
Practical questions will be asked when deputies live simultaneous political and professional lives, writes Philip Ryan
IF you want something done, ask a busy person, they say. There’s a lot of truth to the quote which is attributed to various people, including US founding father Benjamin Franklin and American actress Lucille Ball.
Time management is the key, along with a bit of oldfashioned hard graft. Anyone who has a handle on their own daily schedule is usually better equipped to fit you in or take care of the task you have asked of them. We all have friends who we would trust with organising a night out or weekend away — and then there are those that you wouldn’t trust with a sharp object.
Politics is all about time management and graft. There is a fine art to balancing time in the constituency with building up your national profile. Everyone wants a part of you — constituents, party members, colleagues, media and, last but by no means least, family.
The taxpayer pays for a couple of assistants who help TDs with both constituency and national matters. However, the bulk of the responsibility for politicians’ political future lies with themselves.
The fragile nature of politics and the periodic performance reviews from the electorate mean a politician’s career prospects are in a perpetual state of uncertainty. Working hard on behalf of your voters is not necessarily always good enough — and a sudden wave of public frustration with your party could see you out on your ear.
Doing away with the dual mandate, which allowed TDs to simultaneously serve as councillors, has made it more difficult to be a career politician. A council seat was always a safety net for TDs should they fail to get re-elected to the Dail. It allowed a politician to rebuild their brand at grass-roots level after a bad election while still involving themselves in local issues.
Being an unelected public representative is tricky and it’s difficult to get things done for voters when you don’t have access to the local authority yourself. There are plenty of former Labour Party TDs who will attest to that.
So, given the precarious nature of politics, many politicians have other forms of income to ensure they have a financial safeguard should their career go belly-up. Once their pay is almost fully restored in three years, TDs will earn close to €92,000 a year, plus expenses. Not a bad salary by most people’s standards — and that’s before we mention the pension entitlements. It’s well in excess of the average industrial wage. But for many of them, the salary does not provide the standard of living to which they are accustomed. Very few people go straight into politics and most have other careers before they put themselves before the electorate. In the current crop at Leinster House, there is a smattering of teachers, farmers and legal professionals. There are also a couple of pharmacists, doctors, accountants and auctioneers. All this life experience is very important and makes the Dail a more inclusive and representative reflection of society at large. But there are some ethical issues and possible conflicts of interest that come into play when TDs want their political and professional lives to coexist. In recent weeks, we have watched the Dail’s barristers battle in the face of some mild reforms of how judges are appointed. Last week, Fianna Fail’s upper echelons forced their TDs into the Dail chamber to make embarrassingly pointless contributions on a topic which they and their constituents don’t care about. Fianna Fail justice spokesman Jim O’Callaghan has been instrumental in forming his party’s policy in this area and he ensured the organisation’s full weight has been thrown behind the Fianna Fail attack on Transport Minister Shane Ross’s legislation. There’s nothing wrong with O’Callaghan, who is a senior counsel, leading his party’s charge on the issue — but it is noteworthy that every other barrister in the land was also critical of Ross’s Bill. The life of a barrister is not unlike that of a politician in that they are both sole traders and, for the most part, rely on their own abilities to find work. Barristers, like politicians, are reluctant to take any time off as they fear they may lose work to a colleague. The Leinster House barristers can clearly see the Government could collapse at any given moment and as a consequence, they could end up losing their seats. This means that they might once more find themselves relying on work in the Four Goldmines to earn a living. Their clients would also be at the mercy of the judges whom the TDs so animatedly defended in the Dail. Not to suggest that our eminent friends in the judiciary could be influenced by such things. Another area where an ethical quagmire also emerges is around housing. A quick glance at the Dail’s Register of Members’ interests shows almost a quarter of TDs are landlords — and this includes six Cabinet members.
Nothing wrong with being a landlord, of course — but as the Government struggles to get a handle on possibly the worst housing crisis to grip this country, you would hope a TD’s personal financial investments would not cloud their judgment.
Naturally, if a person has a number of rental properties, the last thing they would want to see is more rent controls. Many of these properties could be in negative equity since the financial crash and every penny that is being raised from rent will be welcome. But there are also queues of people out there trying to get on the property ladder or stuck paying outrageously overpriced rent for small city centre accommodation.
A number of TDs have investments in bank and company shares. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe — who is responsible for deciding how much tax we pay for alcohol, — holds shares in Diageo, one of the world’s biggest drinks companies. Donohoe absented himself from Cabinet meetings on a Bill relating to sponsorship of sports by alcohol companies because of his shareholding. But what will happen when it comes to making budgetary decisions on alcohol tax?
Will he be lobbied by the drinks industry ahead of the Budget? Has he been lobbied already?
Donohoe also has shares in consumer goods multinational Proctor & Gamble.
(The Dail register of members interest does not specify how many shares the minister owns and his spokeswoman was unable to provide any details when asked.)
There is nothing in the Standards in Public Office rules that prevents him from holding on to these shares — but it is fair to ask about the ethics of holding shares, given the decisions that he has to make.
Most TDs who run businesses realise pretty quickly that it is near impossible to balance work and political life. Dublin Rathdown TD Josepha Madigan recently had to step away from her successful family law business because of her workload in Leinster House.
Madigan decided to apply herself full-time to law-making rather than law-practising and should be commended for it. She will have a business to go back on should she fail to re-elected but in the meantime, her cases have been passed on to a business partner.
Kerry TD John Brassil had to hire a pharmacist to look after his pharmacy when he was elected to the Dail. Brassil found it impossible to mix his sizeable amount of constituency work with running his pharmacy business and decided to dedicate his time to being Fianna Fail’s only national representative in the Kingdom.
But should we require TDs to divest themselves of all business interests once they walk across the hallowed grounds of Leinster House? Should they be freed of any potential conflict before they are allowed in the Dail chamber? Or do we need a Dail that is reflective of society?
Most TDs would claim that they are not in it for the money and that they could probably make more in the private sector. The hours would certainly be better and there would be far fewer electoral stresses and personalised attacks from anonymous online political commentators.
The expertise brought to the Dail by politicians with a background in law, medicine or business is vitally important and ensures that the voice of various interest groups is heard during debates.
But there is a fine line between voicing the concerns of a sector of society and allowing current or future business interests to affect your judgment when shaping the country’s legislative landscape.
Maybe if TDs concentrated less on their extra-political affairs, the work of governing the country would run more smoothly.
‘Almost a quarter of TDs are landlords, including six members of the Cabinet’